More than half of U.S. newborns diagnosed with HIV in their first year of life had not been given a treatment known to prevent postnatal transmission from mother to child. That suggests that some maternal infections have been missed, researchers report in the July Pediatrics.
“We need to do a better job of identifying HIV in pregnant women,” says Kengo Inagaki, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Pregnant women are usually tested for HIV in the first trimester of pregnancy. A second test is given in the third trimester, but typically only for women at high risk or in states with higher